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NEW YORK CITY
OH NEW YORK, EVERYBODY LOVES FABULOUS NEW YORK CITY
By PETER THOMAS BUSCH
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ew York City shows down below through the soft clouds as a place of civilization with no beginning and no end.
One instantly feels something special descending gently through the air space, inevitably dipping individual consciousness into the collective consciousness of a greater world, to become forever altered by the experience of time and space of one of the most iconic cosmopolitan cities ever created for civilization.
Industrialists built this complicated city into the present form – perhaps the world’s most influential city and most liveable cosmopolitan city operating all day long and all night long seven days a week. High density living seamlessly synchronizes with a transportation infrastructure for business and for an arts and entertainment community to round out the days.
In Manhattan, builders raced against builders within the city and against builders in other cities like Chicago to be the first to construct bigger taller better skyscrapers with such determination that Manhattan now stretches into the clouds from end to end 100 years later.
Engineered steel frameworks supporting light curtain walls of glass and stone so that towers could reach further into the sky as never before possible. Then the development of high speed elevators enabled builders to go even higher and higher. Tenants and visitors no longer had to worry about taking the stairs up 10 floors with machines put in place to enable people to travel up high, perhaps 20 and 30 floors at first until the Empire State Building was constructed as the tallest skyscraper.
The Empire State Building stretches 102 floors upward, still looming imposingly today after construction completed on Fifth Avenue in 1931. The Art Deco building earns more money annually on visitors to the 86th floor observation deck than on rental income from business tenants.
One cannot stop from looking out the plane window for the Empire State Building and the Statue of Liberty as the plane descends toward JFK International. Missing those icons of industry and civilization during those first few minutes is just the first indication that one cannot see everything in New York all at once, especially not from thousands of feet up descending at hundreds of miles per hour.
New York City remains very much an open city despite the ongoing threat of terrorism and street gun violence. You can still eat a piece of New York style cheesecake inside Grand Central Station just to watch the show of people going somewhere, coming from some place on the many trains and buses using the Central Terminus. Grand Central Station was built in 1871.
Visitors arriving by plane, and using the subway, taxis or Uber might miss this architectural masterpiece if they do not put the transportation hub on the bucket list of must see places, because Grand Central mainly operates as a hub for regional travel.
One of the great public works of the city has been the construction of the subway system that has in fits and starts kept pace with the spread of urban development, although New Yorkers might have better insight into the cohesion of the transportation infrastructure and the spread of high density living from neighbourhood to neighborhood. The point is that the subway misses Grand Central as the system so often does the morning commute.
The subway may be in a greater need of repair today, but the incremental construction of train tunnels and elevated tracks, essential to linking high density, rivals any other city in the world.
Cosmopolitan cities such as Paris, London and New York require a greater synchronization to make efficient use of a limited time and space for business, entertainment and performing arts visitors.
New York City is grand. So grand, visitors may not want to repeatedly head down into the south end of Manhattan on successive days to take in different attractions. Similarly, visitors would not want to find themselves in the south end having to race north to a venue or event during the same day to enjoy a few hours in one of the many art museums there in that part of town.
Unfortunately, I learnt my lesson the hard way, spending one morning at Liberty Island walking around the Statue of Liberty and then the afternoon at the north end of Manhattan for four hours or was the time marked at five hours at the Museum of Modern Art.
Even stopping for lunch in between locations, halfway to the MoMA still made everything a bit hurried. You want to make the most of the whole day, from pressed coffee at breakfast to relaxing at night without taking that hectic pace from work along with you by racing through urban traffic from one venue to the next. You do not want to feel too tired and hungry to appreciate the million-dollar art works on the museum walls.
You want to be able to enjoy every part of the day with a well organized, although flexible daily plan, while always thinking a bit ahead to the next day as well.
New York has so much to offer that just wondering around the famous streets may become simultaneously mesmerizing and overwhelming.
Now before everyone gets started planning, although New York City offers a lot for everyone, the biggest problem for some of the larger venues is that everybody else wants to go there as well. Tickets are scarce and often only available when purchased months in advance, even for the standing attractions such as the Statue of Liberty.
So, before you buy your plane tickets, you have to buy some venue tickets as well. Nothing would be worse than wanting to go to the legendary Central Park Concert on the great green field with Paul Simon headlining, and actually being in the city so that you would have the opportunity to go, but not being able to go because the tickets had been sold out months in advance.
Think of wanting to climb the steps to the observation deck of the Statue of Liberty like wanting to attend the Superbowl. Liberty Island visitors without tickets are restricted to a lesser experience walking around the statue and visiting the gift shop.
You can buy tickets in advance for the pedestal observation deck and an additional ticket for inside the Crown looking out.
Just to avoid too much disappointment, the observation deck of the Liberty Torch has been off limits for safety reasons since 1916, even if you have tickets to the Statue of Liberty. So just forget about leaning against that railing on the Torch deck to take pictures of Manhattan and perhaps a selfie with the golden Torch in the background because no matter how much you wanted to do that, you just can’t, even if you want to pay to stand out there. Maybe try a green screen.
What you can do is get lost in Chinatown for free, trying to find a shop in Little Italy that sells perfect Italian mozzarella. New York City has large sections of the city dedicated to Chinatown and Little Italy.
Lower Manhattan was originally a trading post in 1624. Eventually Lower Manhattan and four other cities were amalgamated to form the one larger city. Manhattan is the Inner City with the business and financial districts as well as the iconic attractions such as Central Park and the Chrysler Building.
Brooklyn, Queens, The Bronx and Staten Island form the other boroughs of New York City that have distinct urban cultures offering a lot to visitors. Inside each borough are the iconic neighbourhoods, such as Tribeca, the Five points and Harlem inside Manhattan, while the Brooklyn Bridge stretches from Lower Manhattan to Brooklyn. People can make the walk across the bridge if for no other reason than to taste the famous thin crust New York pizza.
Now if you are short of time to see everything, and you are not coming back to New York again because there are so many other places around the world to go to, don’t worry because everywhere inside the city, including inside the boroughs and the iconic neighbourhoods inside the boroughs, the clock runs according to New York City time.
England has Greenwich Mean Time, and New York has the New York Minute: the briefest of moments between needing to act and actually acting when a lot has to be accomplished to have a complete day. New Yorkers have made time work for them, rather than allowing time to simply melt away in the sun.
As soon as possible after debarking from the plane, New Yorkers call for their ride with an estimated time of arrival outside the terminal, which is then confirmed only when already finished work at the luggage carousel, so their ride does not have to waste precious minutes finding a parking space, and they can just drive by ever so slowly at exit doors to the arrival lounge, like a valet at a hotel, except you are waiting at the airport.
New Yorkers purchase an electronic transit pass called a MetroCard that you can add stored value to as you ride the subway system, so you do not have to buy a new ticket at every turnstile. The subway operates 24/7 at 472 stations. The system is somewhat complicated with trains having both letters and numbers rather than serialized numbers or destinations as names, but that anomaly is so New York.
Take the “F” train to the Lower East Side.
And take the Express Train instead of the Regular Train. Make sure though that the Express Train available at any given moment actually stops at your stop.
Order pizza for dinner the night before, and save time.
Visitors can also buy the City Pass that provides discount tickets to multiple venues, so you do not have to wait in line at each venue to purchase tickets. 61 million people visited New York City in 2016, making for long line ups for the unprepared traveller. So be organized, and also be prepared for some disappointment working through the crowds, and also be prepared for some surprises.
I kinda thought I saw David Letterman on his stretch break outside the Ed Sullivan Theatre in Times Square during rehearsals for one of his last shows.
I have already built up an appetite, so my first day in town, I want to head to the Lower East Side, and stop at 205 East Houston Street, at the corner of Ludlow for a classic New York pastrami on rye sandwich with a large kosher pickle at Katz’s Delicatessen.
Katz’s has been around since 1888, only moving across the street to make way for that rolling construction of the subway line.
The pastrami is cured over 30 days without any chemical inducements. The cafeteria style atmosphere is nice and friendly with almost no waiting time, except when tasting the pastrami. By the way, that one meal covers off a late lunch and dinner, if you are penny pinching on your dream vacation.
The first day in this spectacular international city is difficult on your sensory perceptions. And so, that may be the days end for the sights and other attractions. The flight is about eight hours from Vancouver International Airport in a slow-moving jet, but also just getting off the plane and walking through the airport is a bit of a mental circus, gradually immersing in this iconic cosmopolitan culture.
Driving from Vancouver to SeaTac International Airport in Washington State before boarding a plane to New York City does not seem to make those first few steps in the destination airport any easier. Visiting New York City was such a dream built up from hundreds and hundreds of pop culture references in real politic and entertainment media over a lifetime that reality all comes crashing down at once.
The United Nations headquarters are right along the East River. The compound is fenced off to the public like the international monolith the architectural icon has become.
Then also Wall Street, on another day perhaps, somewhere over there that place exists deeper into Manhattan as a center point for global financiers.
And then Central Park at Midtown where Dustin Hoffman ran around the reservoir in Marathon Man (1976).
All these images start to swirl around in your head with all those movies and going ons being reported over the years.
I was set off when I saw the first police officer with that distinctive buttoned up dark uniform and flat trimmed hat – that’s when life hit me and I finally realized that I was truly in the Big Apple for a bit.
The next day you feel compelled to run out and hit all the big attractions all in the same day, but if you ask a New Yorker which one should you see first, they kind of bobble their head back a bit and roll their eyes into the back of their heads at you like they have been asked that question 61 million times a year
New York City is safe enough not to be scared to walk around.
Everyone wants something different from their travel experience. So, I am just going to sketch out a few different possibilities.
The first trip to New York City you definitely want to take in three of the best museums in the world. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, at 1000 Fifth Avenue is fabulous. I was fortunate to have been at the MET when the fourth version of Edvard Munch’s The Scream was being exhibited. The Scream is a pastel existential awakening from 1893. Munch created several versions of The Scream, but the two versions in oil paint and the two in pastel are the most sought after by fine art collectors.
Visitors to the Guggenheim Museum get the value of the ticket price just from the enjoyment of being inside the architectural masterpiece designed by world renowned Chicago architect Frank Lloyd Wright, at 1071 Fifth Avenue. The cylindrical shaped museum exhibits non-objective paintings like those of Pablo Picasso and Jackson Pollack.
The point here is that each museum easily envelops four hours of your day. You do not have to be an art expert to enjoy the spectacular art on the walls of these New York spaces as many paintings are million dollar art works easily recognizable from the collective consciousness.
I suggest taking in only one art museum per day, spaced apart by two or three days on a 10 day stay. If you lose the day to culture shock, jet lag and Katz’s Deli, you have to hit one of the museums on your second day.
The days are long during the summer and the city is relatively clean and safe, even the subway and Central Park. You can also plan one or two other events at Midtown on these museum days. But I would try to resist the temptation to rush across New York to squeeze in another iconic site like Yankee Stadium.
Central Park had a bad international reputation in the 1970s as being a dangerous place for visitors preyed upon by pick pockets and perverts, but the park is now used as a transportation and activity hub through which commuters go one way to work and then go the other way back home at the end of the day, and also for visitors just trying to get out of the city canyons created by skyscrapers.
New Yorkers also hang out at the park.
Central Park encompasses between 830 and 850 acres, depending on to what source you refer, after a dedication on July 21, 1853. The Great Lawn inside the park often hosts free concerts. And the lake caretaker invites visitors to rent row boats and gondolas for a bit of a romantic interlude that feels a bit surreal.
The rest of Central Park includes Belvedere Castle, the running track around the reservoir, and even baseball fields.
The Dakota Apartments once was the sole building overlooking Central Park. The Renaissance style residences are famous for being the home to the beautiful Lauren Bacall for 53 years, until her death in 2014. Bacall lived in a nine room apartment facing Central Park.
Judy Garland, Rudolph Nureyev and John Lennon also made their New York home in the Dakota. Yoko Ono still lives there.
Visitors can rent bicycles or go rollerblading in Central Park, although the park is a high traffic intersection as Bono of U2 found out a few years ago now when he crashed his bicycle and broke something important.
On the third day, the culture shock starts to lose the battle of wits end, and so a good walk should get rid of the rest of the internal malaise.
Brooklyn is also a good pedestrian day walk beginning with taking your time walking over the Brooklyn Bridge with many second looks back at Lower Manhattan and the Freedom Tower. A pedestrian walkway bisects the bridge on the top level with the vehicle traffic rumbling on a separate lower level, leaving visitors with uninterrupted views through the spider glass window of cables.
The Brooklyn Bridge joined the borough of Brooklyn with the borough of Manhattan on May 24, 1883, 13 years after construction began. Two dozen workers died during construction, including the lead design engineer, John Roebling.
The Brooklyn Bridge was the world’s first steel-cable suspension bridge. After the American Civil War in 1865, and with the Great Migration of Blacks to the northern industrial cities thereafter, about 40 per cent of the workforce in Brooklyn took the ferry to Manhattan before the bridge was built.
The Blue Grotto in the vaults of the bridge is used to store wine at a temperature of 60 degrees Fahrenheit. Most of all, the bridge takes you to the Italian pizza parlors of Brooklyn nestled amidst the shadows formed over the years from the many movie sets created between the historical buildings and famous streets of the Borough.
Brooklyn is well worth a day if not more just walking and eating. Visitors can work up an appetite before mid-day, and then head back over the bridge at night for dinner at Pier 17.
I might hit another museum the next day and then head north in the evening into Harlem for a walk down Malcolm X Boulevard. Harlem is the poor East Side of the Inner City where the new migrants to New York have made their home over the decades. African Americans made up the majority of Harlem residents in the 1950s and 1960s.
Malcom X (1925-1965) was a Muslim human rights activist who preached Black power to the people of the Inner Cities until he was assassinated in Lower Manhattan on February 21, 1965.
Harlem showed gratitude for Malcolm X’s public service by holding his funeral and putting his name on the Boulevard.
On the fourth day, I would head down to Lower Manhattan again, maybe stop at Grand Central Station, if you have not already done so for a latte and that piece of cheesecake I told you about earlier, and then keep on going south to the Highline.
The Highline is an elevated linear pedestrian park built on abandoned viaduct sections of the West Side rail line. Landscape architects have greened up the elevated tracks and turned the viaduct into a pedestrian corridor that starts near the historic Meatpacking District and ends at the ever hip Greenwich Village.
The Meatpacking District historically housed about 250 slaughterhouses and meat packing plants of the 20th Century. The butcher block is still home to about 140 protected historical buildings. Subtle variations in the architecture of the buildings indicates what decade they are from and the best practices of the slaughterhouses.
The district has been revitalized with shops and bakeries attracting many of the visitors going to and from a stone throw away at Greenwich Village and the Freedom Tower.
Freedom Tower One and the 9/11 memorial Gardens are nearby.
Coney Island was decimated by Hurricane Sandy during 2012. The coastal community recovered though. Coney Island hosts an amusement park with some 50 rides, a boardwalk and many restaurants and kiosks.
Businesses and rides are independently owned and operated, unlike centrally managed amusement parks like Disneyland.
The New York transit pass will pay your ticket on about a 45 minute train ride from Midtown to the oceanside at Coney Island where the high season lasts from Easter to Halloween.
I would leave an entire day for Coney Island. Oh, before you leave, don’t forget to have a Coney Island hotdog, which is a special hotdog topped with savoury meat sauce or cheeses and other fixings, and then walk down the beach along the wooden boardwalk.
One more museum day is up next. You might want to start at Rockefeller Centre in the morning and then go across the street to Saint Michael’s Church, before heading to the MoMA, at 11 West 53 Street. Rockefeller Centre is iconic for being home to United States broadcast television networks and the New York Christmas tree lighting ceremony every December.
New York City is so wonderful, and the people are just so fine that a huge metaphysical down cycle awaits visitors returning home with culture shock in reverse drive.
